The Cyclist Who Beat Diabetes

Nine Years After Picking Up Cycling to Ward off Diabetes, Jade Wilcoxson Wins a U.S. Title

ENLARGE

Jade Wilcoxson won the USA Cycling Professional Road National Championships last month, nine years after being diagnosed as a pre-diabetic.
Sam Wiebe

By

Kevin Helliker

June 13, 2013 10:12 p.m. ET

The Jade Wilcoxson playbook for winning cycling's national road-racing championship calls for starting late. Very late.

During your teens and most of your 20s, don't ride at all. Instead of training, obtain a clinical doctorate in physical therapy and work with disabled patients who struggle to complete the smallest tasks. Then, after a sobering diagnosis from your own doctor, buy a road bike, train for nine short years and enter and win the sport's most-coveted domestic trophy—transforming yourself into a contender for the 2016 U.S. Olympic team.

Asked to explain her unlikely ascent to the top of American cycling, the shy Wilcoxson puts it this way: "When I get on a bike, there's a switch that's flipped and I want to beat everyone around me."

In the culture of endurance athletics, how an athlete reaches the podium is a matter of obsessive interest. What she eats, how she trains, which equipment she rides—even how she stays afloat financially—become valuable secrets. But the Wilcoxson model calls into question a tenet fundamental to the pursuit of all sporting championships: that winning must matter more than anything. Working with the disabled did something more than prepare Wilcoxson for the harsh equation behind competitive cycling: that every inch of gain requires miles and miles of pain.

"It takes months of hard work to go from not being able to move in bed to being able to walk at home safely, and it is painful work," said Wilcoxson. "Those patients inspired me."

Even her win last month at the USA Cycling Professional Road National Championships—an honor that confers upon her the right to wear a stars-and-stripes racing jersey over the next year—hasn't lessened the pull of those patients. After quitting physical therapy to turn pro as a cyclist, "I struggle with what I'm doing now to help people's lives, to help the world as a whole," she said, adding: "Cycling is a selfish profession. You have to be self centered in your training and travel."

As it happens, however, Wilcoxson's story bears a public-health message that she hopes to promote through her newfound celebrity. At 26, with her doctorate freshly minted from Pacific University and her physical-therapy career under way, Wilcoxson received a medical diagnosis that shocked her. "My doctor told me I was prediabetic," she said.

The diagnosis meant that Wilcoxson had inherited a genetic predisposition for diabetes, a disease that raged through her father's family. So even though she'd always been diet conscious and physically active (having played soccer competitively), she realized now that enhanced vigilance would be required. So at age 26 she bought a road bike, and began training with her older brother for a coming 100-mile race. She did well in that race, possibly crossing the finish line ahead of every other woman—results weren't carefully tracked—but definitely catching the bug.

"After that race, she was so excited that I knew this cycling thing was going somewhere," recalls her mother, Cindy Wilcoxson.

After discovering her genetic vulnerability to diabetes, Wilcoxson soon learned she had a genetic proclivity toward endurance athletics, too.

In local races in Oregon, where she lived and worked as a physical therapist, she found herself crossing the finish line far ahead of rivals who had trained longer and harder. As she trained longer and harder, she began reaching the podium, her full potential clarifying at the 2011 Sea Otter Classic, whereas an amateur she came in second behind cycling pro Kristin Armstrong, who had won a gold medal at the Beijing Olympics. "That was shocking to me," said Wilcoxson.

In the lingo of sports science, Wilcoxson sports a big engine, a genetic advantage less easily measured than blood sugar but on full display recently when she ran her first foot race. "I've never been much of a runner," Wilcoxson said. Really? She won the 5-kilometer race.

At 35, Wilcoxson is the oldest member of the Optum Pro Cycling women's team, having quit physical therapy to turn professional only a year ago. "The average age of our team is 24 or 25," said Rachel Heal, the team's performance director.

Yet Wilcoxson may be succeeding because of her late start rather than despite it. Thirty-something cyclists who have been competing since their teens are prone to burnout, a hazard familiar to Wilcoxson's longtime coach, Kendra Wenzel, a former professional cyclist who retired at 34. "Physically I could have competed for eight more years, but mentally I was ready for something new," said Wenzel, adding that "Jade is mentally fresh."

Economics also favor the Wilcoxson model. Because professional cycling pays its top women only about $30,000 a year with no health or retirement benefits, those entering their 30s are often forced to return to school or otherwise cultivate a second career. Being an experienced physical therapist with a doctorate gives Wilcoxson a sense of financial security. "Knowing she has a career she can go back to, Jade can focus 100% of her time and energy on being the best cyclist she can be," said Heal, the Optum Pro women's performance director.

Wilcoxson is by no means washed up. Only days before Armstrong's 39th birthday last summer, she won her second Olympic gold medal. In the last 20 years, two women older than Wilcoxson won the U.S. road-race championship, including 38-year-old Pamela Schuster in 1998. Wilcoxson hopes to earn a spot on the Olympic team (and better yet a medal) at the Rio Games in 2016, when she will be 38. To support her cause, her parents have moved from California to Talent, Ore., where both of their children live. Wilcoxson's older brother, Ryan, no longer trains and races with her, joking that the website he recently helped launch, a brew-reviewing service called Beer Citizen, requires him to drink too much beer to stay super fit.

Wilcoxson argues that her first-place finish at last month's national championship represented less an individual accomplishment than an Optum Pro team victory. But she believes that the best way to honor a team named after a health-care company might be to share the news that she's 20 pounds lighter than when she was diagnosed as prediabetic, and that her blood-sugar levels have returned to normal.

You don't need a big engine to appreciate this advice from a national champion: "Make some changes that will pay off tenfold down the road," she says.

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